Stacking/Dof - Coin Community Forum

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Author	Replies: 4 / Views: 2,103
Sidekick-CA Pillar of the Community United States 509 Posts	Posted 05/22/2011 09:40 am I've seen several mentions of this on the forum here and am wondering if this is really necessary/effective/beneficial when doing tabletop shooting of an inanimate target such as a coin. Just some kind of overkill? From what I've been able to find, a series of pix are taken of the same object while varying the DOF through the use of F/stops. Pix are then fed into the magical software (Helicon Focus among others) which renders an optimized, ultra-sharp single photo? < See Video Below > The end product certainly looks impressive but is it really necessary if the shot is done correctly the first time? Or first few times after finding the sweet spot. One benefit I CAN see though is the apparent increased SNR it talks about on the Helicon web site. Report this Post to the Staff

SsuperDdave Moderator United States 23522 Posts	Posted 05/22/2011 11:39 am Stacking is irrelevant with a pure camera/lens combo; I've never had any difficulty achieving sufficient depth of field. It is only when you start increasing magnification to greater than 1:1, not possible without specialized setups like bellows and such, that DOF becomes a factor. Report this Post to the Staff
Sidekick-CA Pillar of the Community United States 509 Posts	Posted 05/22/2011 1:32 pm Thanks for that SD. Don't think I'll be needing greater than 1:1 except for fun and games. I will be using a bellows though so at some later point I may give it a whirl just to see what kind of results I can get and how much difference it makes. Report this Post to the Staff
rmpsrpms Pillar of the Community United States 4038 Posts	Posted 05/22/2011 9:09 pm Even at f/4, but certainly at f/5.6, you get sufficient DOF on most coins that you don't really need to stack. If you go to f/8 or f/11, you definitely don't need to. Maybe if you're doing a high relief coin, but not for regular issues. This is of course true only if you keep the coin plane parallel with the sensor plane... Contact me for photographic equipment or visit my home page at: http://macrocoins.com Report this Post to the Staff
rmpsrpms Pillar of the Community United States 4038 Posts	Posted 05/22/2011 10:24 pm Here is a high mag stacking sequence at 10X done with two Lincoln Cent images, one focused on the coin field, the other on high points of the date. Even at 10X you can get a pretty good image with only 2 source images. Focus on field: Focus on high point of 4 in Date: And here is the resulting focus stack: Contact me for photographic equipment or visit my home page at: http://macrocoins.com Report this Post to the Staff
	Replies: 4 / Views: 2,103

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